Conqueror Recruitment - Outpost vs. Vassal vs. Vanilla Settlement - What Controls It?

[Captain LaserBeam]

I posted something about this yesterday but it was vague so I'm reposting with some more clarity behind it in hopes that someone might know something. I've noticed that a whole lot of mods that add settlers or workshop recruitables (or even certain vanilla characters like the advanced vendors - Vault-Tec Rep, Smiling Larry, Doc Anderson, etc.) only allow you to recruit to vanilla workshops. This is problematic in a few ways because whether you're playing as a Conqueror or a Liberator, you're going to want to convert most of your settlements into some kind of outpost or vassal, and it seems that you can't send a whole bunch of recruitables to those locations. I suspected that it might be an activator based on the Bethesda Mod School tutorial on recruiting Trudy and Patrick, but I couldn't find a similar thing in place in Conqueror (unless it's the captive activator?) Or is it something else, like a faction affiliation? I've tried searching through the quests for the raider leaders (Jason, Sarah, Brutus, etc.) but haven't found a specific thing that then recruits them to be part of the outpost. I feel like I'm definitely missing something!

In general, just trying to figure out how to make it so you can send certain NPCs to outposts or vassals when they seem to only want to go to vanilla settlements/workshops. As with many things, I'm sure there's a bunch of ways to do this but just looking for a clue after all the time I've spent looking through quests in xedit and in the CK.

 

[Phil_T_Casual]

CQ uses Nukaworlds system for Outposts/Vassals. The reason why the NW system doesn't allow npc's in the player character faction to be sent to outposts is because it's possible for you to loose control of outposts/vassals through game mechanics.
You would then wind up with a scenario where your companions/unique's are living in a settlement that is hostile to them.
Or possibly they become hostile to you, either way it would cause havoc with aliases/factions which is probably why Beth set it up this way.

 

[Captain LaserBeam]

Okay, I think I see. So the activator triggered through dialogue or something else is a nukaworld activator? And perhaps if I replaced the activator in the existing unique NPC recruitment with that one or altered their faction records that would provide the result? It doesn't seem purely controllable through factions, though. I have noticed you can obviously get a vanilla settlement, send them to it, and then conquer it, but slowly you start to run out of places where you can do this. It does seem inconsistent though. For instance, you can send Ada anywhere, but you can't send Codsworth to an outpost, but you CAN send him to a vassal. It's really confusing.